← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we discuss how to read the Bible like St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante. We'll look at a letter that Dante wrote to his patron explaining that you interpret the Divine Comedy the same way you interpret Holy Scripture. And then look at a mini catechesis that Dante gives on how to read the Bible. We'll discuss the claim of divine authorship, the traditional four senses of biblical interpretation, and then work through each sense with examples and explanations. So join us today for an important conversation on how to read the Bible like Jesus Christ, St. Paul, the early church fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We are recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. Check out our podcasts on the Iliad, the Odyssey, and of course, Dante's Inferno. We can be your small group. You can read the great books with Ascend. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have several written guides to help you through the great books. Today we are discussing how to read the Bible like St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, a fascinating subject and we have two wonderful guests to help us through this. So again, welcome back to the podcast. Mr. Thomas Lackey, Independent scholar, member of our Sunday Great Books group. Just a few of his many accolades. Mr. Lackey, how are you doing?
- [01:47]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Doing very well. It's such a beautiful night.
- [01:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I know. Actually, we are all very much in rural Oklahoma, now that I think about it. So three guys from rural Oklahoma to explain St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante on the Bible. This is going to be a good evening. And we have a star who has returned to the podcast. A star. Our wayward son is back. We have Mr. Adam Minahan of Year with Homer fame who has come back to the podcast. Adam, how you doing?
- [02:13]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Great, man. It's good to be back. It's good to have a chance to discuss this topic. It's been a lot of fun to listen to the to Ascend throughout this last year and to see it grow and see all your cool guests and it's been a lot of fun, a cool journey and I was hoping that you were actually going to introduce me as Adam, who is a broken arrow by birth. And by manners. But that wasn't the case. But, yeah, it's great to be back. Thanks for. Thanks for having me.
- [02:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Not a problem in my head.
- [02:46]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
That went differently. And it was Adam Nestor. Mini Hand. Yes.
- [02:50]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Old Man Nestor.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I could have thrown in a reference to Old man Nestor. That would have been great, too. Well, tell us about. So you. You moved out to rural Oklahoma as well. You moved on the other side of the planet from me, but you moved out through rural Oklahoma. So you know what's going on. You have chickens, you have cows. What are you doing out there?
- [03:05]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Yeah, we actually do. We. I bought 10 acres, but about eight months ago, we got a whole host of chickens and a couple cows. We bought some cows, oh, a couple weeks ago, and it's been really cool to. To just like train them to. To feed, to come in. The. The kids just sat out there and watched them for probably 30 minutes. Now, if you've never watched cows before, they don't do really anything. They just stand there. But they were still fascinated by them, so it was a lot of fun. We got a couple ponds, so we're doing fishing. And yeah, it's. It's. It's great to be out in the quiet and the still in solitude. As much insofar as you. You can with a family of seven.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very much so. How do you call your cows in? Do you have, like, one of those sirens on your truck or how do you get them?
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Mr. Adam Minahan
Are you calling like.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like verbally call them verbally?
- [03:59]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Yeah, that's what I do.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, wow. When I hunt up in Osage county, up by the Kansas border, all those guys basically have sirens on their feed trucks. So in the morning I've been out there and like, you know, hunters are like, oh, there must have been a terrible accident on the highway or something. Like, there's just all these sirens going off. It's like, no, those are actually all the locals feeding their cows.
- [04:19]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Yeah, well, I don't have a lot of land, so it's not that. It's not that difficult. They can hear me from really anywhere.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Your neighbors probably also appreciate you not having a siren on the back of your truck every time you want to call a.
- [04:28]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Now, we do. We did bring it. We did buy a dinner bell. So we have this big bell on the out. You know that when my kids are out there running, I got tired of yelling for them, so we just ring that bell. And the. The rule is in the manhand house, if you hear the bell, you stop what you're doing and you immediately come inside. So that's been working fantastically.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
That sounds very charming.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
I think we need one of those, Thomas.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I know we need one of those, Thomas.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, we've got chickens. We got horses. We don't have any cows, though. I don't think we've got room. We've. We've only got five acres.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a good thing to keep telling your wife. We do not have room for a cow. That's good. That's good, Thomas, because mine keeps asking me for one of those blasted mini cows, and I keep putting it off. So we have a really.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
What are you gonna do with the mini cow if you. If you had it?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think it's just primarily a pet, but also currently look at it. You can buy a dairy cow. You can buy a mini dairy cow that actually produces a good amount of milk. Yeah.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
The problem with that is, is that you don't actually own the dairy cow. The dairy cow owns you.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And I'm under no illusion of who's gonna end up going out there when it's, like, rainy or cold or, like, let a. Let it go out there. It's, you know, it's wet outside. So that I know exactly what's going to happen. So. No, I'm dragging my feet on that one. The general rule on the garlic homestead is that you can only add one animal a year. And so this year we're adding bees. So we have two hives that we're putting together right now.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
Nice. Nice.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
Good.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
I'm glad you're doing that so I can get honey from you. You make some mead.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think it's going to be how we could make meat. Actually. I was actually kind of excited about that. I think it takes a little bit to get them up and running. And I still have this very kind of quixotic understanding of beekeeping, which I think I talk about when we go through the Greek plays where they're just going to come to me and I don't have to wear a suit or anything. So I feel like there's going to be a cold, dark reality that I'm going to run into here pretty quick, but we'll see how it goes. All right, so on the small groups, we have our Sunday small group, and we read Dante's Inferno for Lent. We also read through it on the podcast. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed just like the iron sharpens iron. Reading it as a fraternity, I learned a lot. I always appreciate when you read things with a group. It's like, you've read it multiple times yourself because people are bringing those different insights. Because usually when you read, your brain focuses on a particular pattern or a particular thread and you start seeing that connection as you go through it, but then someone else has focused on something different and they bring it all together. So I think it's a really beautiful aspect to read these texts together. But I'm kind of curious as you guys read Dante's Inferno again for Lent, like, did anything particular stand out to you or anything that you learned on this read through? Maybe Adam, start with you?
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Mr. Adam Minahan
Sure, yeah. I mean, I, I, I thoroughly enjoyed it too, man. Like, and it's just such a blessing and a gift to be able to read the text with other guys each week and, and kind of unpack, you know, unpack what Dante has, has to share with us. One thing that I really wrestled with this, this go around. This is probably, that was probably my fourth time to read the Inferno. I've read Esalen's translation, which I think is, that's one you've been, you've been going through. I have Moose's translation that's like the one that I just cannot let go of because it has all my notes in it. So it's just one that I would. It's like you can take almost anything of mine. But don't take this translation because I have way too many notes. It's too much, too many years of writing it down. But I really wrestled this time with Dante's understanding of grace and nature and how those relate to the different levels in hell. You know, Canto 18, 19, 20, 21 is all very difficult for me to. It was specifically the first few times that I read. It was difficult for me to understand, like, why those who are selling church offices and committing simony, why are they higher up than those who are committing sins against selling off political offices and things like that. That did not make sense to me. So I really wrestled with that this go around and trying to understand the, you know, what Dante is teaching us in relationship to grace and nature and how he views the hierarchy or the low archy of hell. Come on.
- [08:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, No, I appreciate that. Yeah. I think that was something that we wrestled with in our small group as well, because you just assume he's going to apply the basic kind of Catholic theological philosophical principle that the corruption of the best is the worst. And so therefore, like the thing of grace highest, these things of grace that we have, corrupting them would then produce the worst. So like simony, like you're selling church Offices would then be worse than selling, like, a political office because it's a violation of grace over nature. So, no, I think he does. You know, it's interesting because when you read the Purgatory, I feel like purgatory is very, very structured, and it's pretty much structured exactly how you think it would be structured. Like, he just kind of. You're purging yourself of the seven deadly sins. You have to be purged of pride first, and you kind of move up in reverse order out of there. It's a beautiful text, but it is fairly ordered and pretty predictable as well. Inferno. It seems that he responds in a very different way and has, like, some very interesting takes on how these sins are ordered against one another. I think on the podcast, one of the things we talked about was, you know, could you see it as these violations against the common good? Is that. Is that what he's doing? And again, you would say, well, one of the best. You know, the corruption of the best be the worst. But he seems to also understand, I think, a different way that grace and nature interact, which is that grace has to perfect nature, which then means that if nature is suffering a terrible privation, like it itself is so corrupt and disordered, grace can't really adhere. It can't really take that and do anything with it. So you think of, like, you know, you can take a terrible human being and ordain them a priest and a deacon, and guess what? They remain a terrible human being because they don't have that natural virtue that actually makes them disposed to receive the fruits of grace. So even if they have that, like, indelible mark on their soul, like, grace still comes to them. And of course, God could work through them if he desires to, but they themselves, because of the corruption of their nature, they're not open and predisposed towards the fruits of grace. So it seems like Dante is doing something like that, because what he's saying is, you know, think of Florence. It's a Catholic town that has the true faith, and it's just an absolute cesspool. And they're not just failing at the theological virtues, they're failing at the natural ones. And therefore, there's nothing for the grace to kind of graft onto, if that makes sense. I don't think that's like a golden bullet. I don't think that, like, solves all the problems, but I think that might be one way to try and wrestle with that structure.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
And, you know, that's something. I mean, we'll talk about this Tonight, right in this kind of. We'll get into our discussion. But when the first couple of times I read this, I was just reading it from a literal translation. Like, I was just grasping on to like, what is he trying to say? And I didn't take the time to really unpack that. And like, like, why would he be doing it this way? And, and so my, my initial reaction, which is always the, the, the wrong reaction you should take when reading, you know, a literary master like Dante is like, well, he's just clearly wrong. This is like, not really what he's like. He just misstepped here. And so that's another reason why I think the importance of just reading these types of texts and revisiting them, especially with other friends. So that way you can ask these questions, unpack these, these truths, and really be able to have Dante the teacher come to life, so to speak, in the group. So, yeah, it was, it was very edifying this, this lent. To read through it for, like I said, the fourth time, I think, and, and specifically with, with you guys.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Dante is a teacher. And I agree with you if something seems off, I think the. We have to have that docility, that humility to say, okay, what we assume Dante's a teacher. He's the one that's brilliant. You know, what lesson am I missing here? And I think, yeah, because there's several times in the Inferno that I either didn't get it or something was confusing to me. And you have to take a deep breath and say, okay, what's going on? Thomas, what about you? What'd you think about this read of the Inferno?
- [12:54]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I think this time through especially. So the last time I read it on my own without any sort of group, and this time I think one thing that leapt out and this will lead into some of the topics tonight is even though, as you mentioned, that Purgatorio is even more structured, I think the structure of this and the way that he presages events and things. One example would be the kind of resonance between Francesco and Paolo at the beginning and, and Tugellino at the end and things like that. But the gist is that there's a structure and sometimes even a mathematical structure to what he's doing that does have a very scripture like, imposed order on what he's doing. And the way he continues that some of the commentaries, of course, we didn't go through all of these other parts of the comedy. The way he draws that through the entire commedia is. I mean, the, the. It is amazing to Me that the mind that could order from all 100 Cantos in the way that he did, such that you can have references that repeat, for example, in the same Kanto number in each section of the Commedia and things like that. So, I mean, I think that. That the lattice work that holds it all together, uh, really drew me in more, I think, this time than the last.
- [14:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's. That's one area that I really look forward to growing in my own understanding of Dante is I've read the Purgatory a few times now. I think it's probably my favorite right now. I'm actually really excited to pick it up next lint, which is gonna be here before we know it. Cause it's actually early next year. And so I was already kind of scheduling that out, but I'm excited to pick that back up and. And work through it with the group. But. And I think I've only read Paradise, I think, once and kind of struggled with it. And so I'm excited to read that in the group as well. But this idea that you can stack them on top of one another and the Kantos line up and there's like these vertical themes, that's. That's amazing to me. But like, I. I haven't even begin to scratch the surface of.
- [15:01]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
I think Odysseus is mentioned. I think it's in 26. Is it, is that correct? Anyway, on. In each of the. The ones Narcissus is mentioned, I think in 19. Again, in each of the ones as a passing illusion. What does that mean exactly? I don't know, but it's beyond coincidental, right?
- [15:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, No, I think it's an area of scholarship that we can dig into. And again, like Adam said, the great books you can come back to time and time again. That's what makes them great, right? They have these life lessons. They invite us to what's true, good and beautiful. And these teachers really are the masters. You can study the comedy your whole life if you wanted to.
- [15:37]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
This is hardly, you know, a new topic. But I just, I think also a secondary and deeper appreciation for just how much of the Great Books tradition of Dante's own day he had absorbed and sort of just. It suffuses the entirety of the. Again, obviously you read it. The Greek allusions, the Roman allusions. He's not even trying to hide them, but just how seamlessly he weaves them all together. He was obviously a master not just of this Christian tradition, but of the classical tradition as well. It's just impressive. It's impressive every time you see it, no matter how many times you see him do it.
- [16:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he's very much like reading a whole library. And so I think maybe to segue into tonight's subject, I mean, this is where I think too, one of the most practical lessons that he gives us and why I wanted to kind of circle back to it and give it its own episode, is reading. The comedy really does help us become a better reader of Scripture, and we'll kind of see why. And that he can be not only a master of kind of this overall zenith of this culture, this medieval culture that offers all these different strands like the, you know, the Roman history and the Greek mythology and, you know, Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, but also that he helps you refine your own skill set and how to read Scripture. So let me kind of like set this up a little bit for us. So kind of one of our kind of like opening principles I think that we're going to take is from St. Jerome. The ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. So we want to understand Scripture. Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. And so we come to understand Jesus through his church. Like, how do we come to understand Jesus Christ? And the church offers us both holy scripture and sacred tradition. We talk about these together as the sacred deposit. This is the totality of what our Lord taught to the apostles. That's then handed down whether in word or in, you know, written form or orally as well. But the scriptures obviously play this very particular part. They're the word of God, this very kind of enshrined part of encapsulating that apostolic teaching, the gospel message and that apostolic tradition right there at the beginning. And so the problem here, if you take St. Jerome quite seriously, which I think we should, that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. What if we read scripture incorrectly? Like, would this not skew our understanding of Jesus? And so I think this, I mean, there's a great danger here, right? Because I think as modern, sometimes we think the Bible is just a book that you can just pick up and read and, you know, oh, it'll just simply be self evident. But I think we actually do have to take a step back and say, well, how do we read the Bible? Because I want to read the Bible correctly, enable in order to be able to understand Jesus correctly. And so I actually want to share a quote here from Bishop Kondola, who's the bishop here with us in the diocese of Tulsa. He says we are called to measure ourselves against the teaching of Christ and his church, not our own imaginations or standards. We must receive the Jesus Christ who came 2000 years ago, not create a Jesus who meets the fashions and fads of this age. And so one of the things that I think we really have to understand is that, I mean, obviously the entire sacred deposit does this, and the church helps us do this overall, but scripture in a particular way, right? Reading scripture correctly is supposed to anchor us in the true Jesus Christ, the Christ who actually came incarnate, who kind of entered into history and actually walked the earth. How do I have that connection with that Jesus? I don't want to have a Jesus that is simply an echo of our age, which is what I think is we're always tempted to do, right? We're always tempted to refashion our Lord and what's popular today or even maybe, you know, in our response when we're recalcitrant to the world, we. We kind of move too much the other direction. We don't want to create a Jesus. We want to receive a Jesus. And so I think that reading scripture is an incredibly important part of how to receive the reality of Jesus Christ.
- [19:48]
Mr. Adam Minahan
I agree. Don't you miss my commentary? I mean, come on, you guys have got to be missing my commentary.
- [19:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I did. I know. You know what? We actually have a complete lack on here now that I just tried to give this beautiful, you know, exposition on why we should read scripture. We'll just kind of, you know, go right back into the muck. But you know what? We really, you know, I really miss that we've had a complete dearth of puns on the podcast, Adam, since your departure. Like, no one, Thomas, did not pick up that mantle. Like, neither did Dr. Grabowski. I mean, we've had a complete lack of puns on this podcast.
- [20:20]
Mr. Adam Minahan
It's probably really hurt your ratings, I'm sure.
- [20:22]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
It's like a. It's a hole right here.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, well, you two can. I'm going to move on, so I think I'm just going to make the point that I think Scripture is really important. So. So this raises the question then, how do we read scripture correctly? Because we want to receive that Jesus Christ. We don't want to manufacture one through our own imaginations and fads and fashions. And so we. Then we have to have a standard. How do we read this? Well, of course, we kind of look into the tradition of the church. We look at the church to be a teacher, and she turns then to Dante. I think Dante is a phenomenal teacher on how to read scripture. And so if you're unfamiliar, Dante wrote a letter to his patron, Lord Congrande, right, The big dog, this kind of warlord that was his patron. And so he's telling him about the comedy and what he's writing and these types of things and the letters available online. His letter to the Kong Grande. But he says in there, hey, by the way, how do you read the comedy? Like, how should you read this poem that I'm, you know, this kind of epic poem that I'm writing? And Dante makes a huge claim. He says, oh, you read the comedy the same way that you read scripture. It's a really wonderful letter. I've actually used it in Ocia, the class that people take if they're thinking about becoming Catholic. I've used it as like a small snapshot of how should we read scripture? Because he actually gives a little mini catechesis, right? And so maybe just as to map what he says. And then we'll kind of go into each one in detail. And so he says that there's basically two broad categories with four overall senses. And so the first one, the first category which has one sense in it is the literal. And we'll kind of get into what this means. There's the literal, then there's the spiritual sense. And the spiritual sense or category has three senses in it. And this is your allegorical, your moral and your anagogical, a word that we typically don't use very often. And so we'll have to kind of unpack that a little bit. But these are typically referred to as the four senses, right? If we say, oh, we read scripture according to the four senses. This is what you're talking about. The literal, the allegorical, the moral and anagogical. It should be mentioned here, just like as an outset, like a brief mapping that Dante doesn't invent these. He pulls them from St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas takes up these four senses in the beginning of his Summa theologica. But also St. Thomas is not inventing these four senses. These are ubiquitous inside the early church. This is kind of when the early church fathers are commenting on how should we read scripture. There's lots of different takes, but this kind of four senses, what might be called the quadriga, the quadriga was a four horsed chariot. So this four horse chariot is four senses of how to read scripture. This is kind of a refinement, if you will, of the teachings of the early church. And so in a lot of ways, this is the teaching of the church. This tradition that's come down to us in our day and age of how do we read scripture? Well, read it according to the four senses. And in my opinion, it tends to be very neglected. We're not used to this. If you go to, like, a parish Bible study, we can talk about this more. But if you go to a parish Bible study, you typically aren't moving through the four senses. There's some senses we like as moderns. There's some that I think are very alien to us. And so I think this is a good way for us to step back and receive some of the fruits of our own tradition and say, okay, how can I build my own skill set in reading scripture correctly? And also then how did I maybe already practice that by reading Dante's Inferno for Lent? Because his argument is, is that both the comedy and scripture are read according to the same four senses.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
Yeah. And I think it's a muscle that, like, once you. Once you come to the realization of what these are, you know, and you're introduced to them, it really is a muscle that you have to train yourself to and push yourself intellectually to be looking for these things. Otherwise, it's very easy to map onto the literal and just think, yep, I got it. I understand what he's saying and move on. And that's a recipe that not only, you know, Scripture itself warns us against, that you can't. That you can take it out of context and, you know, twist it to your own demise, but then also you just miss out on. On some of the beauty and the insights that these authors and this great conversation is having. And it'll just completely go right past you to the point where you think that you're in the conversation and actually you don't even know what they're talking about.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
I think it's. Well, I would add to that that sometimes you can see St. Paul using these senses as he interprets the Old Testament. So there's also the sense in which not only do we read, for example, the New Testament and we need to read within these sense, but we watch St. Paul do this very thing. And so there's. To follow the movement of his thought, you also have to follow the senses that he's drawing out. And so while it's prevalent, not just in the sense only in the early church, in the sense of Aphrodite, it's literally the way that scripture reads scripture. So it's a. Yeah.
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Mr. Adam Minahan
And here's how much. How important it is. Right. Is that to ignorance of Scripture Ignorance of Christ. Like, you know, St. Jerome says Deacon, and, you know, what does the Baltimore Catechism talk about? But, you know, what are we made for this life is to know him, love him and serve him in this life so that we can have eternal life with him forever in heaven in the next. Well, in order to know him, in order to love him, you have to know Him. The more you know him, the more you can love him. The more you love him, the more than you desire and want to serve Him. And so if you have such a. A flat, so to speak, or a elementary understanding of what love is and what. What this relationship really is in Christ, then it's hard to even grow. It's hard to evangelize, it's hard to share. It's hard to share this, the good news of Jesus Christ with others if you actually don't have that deep relationship with him yourself. So this is actually how important and how critical it is to understand as a. As a Catholic, that Dante is teaching us right now.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
One push I would make. I mean, we can follow Aquinas on this, so I'll set it up and then we might move towards one of the saints, something. But I actually think, strangely, we neglect the literal quite a lot these days, and we want to move directly to a moral reading, which is one of the spiritual senses. But as Aquinas points out, the. The more all the spiritual senses presuppose the literal, and we essentially want to put the lit. We don't rely too much on the literal, probably. I think this is largely a result of historical and textual criticism that we're just afraid that if we rely on the literal sense that we're going to get burned. And so we try to move directly into an allegorical or a moral read without. Without first wrestling with what the text is actually saying. And I think. I think that's too quick a move. And one that. So I guess my thesis there would be to recover a proper understanding of the spiritual senses, we have to go back to a proper understanding of the literal sense and then build up.
- [27:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, the literal. The literal is the foundation of the home. And actually the Catechism talks about this, right? If you skew the literal, pulling from St. Thomas Aquinas as well, if you skew the literal, then the three spiritual senses will be skewed as well. So now literal is incredibly important. Maybe a few preliminaries. I thought both your comments were well said. I appreciate Adam's comment that knowledge is an antecedent to love. It's Something that we don't think about as moderns.
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Mr. Thomas Lackey
Right.
- [28:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We think about love as an emotion, but knowledge is, you know, a prerequisite of love. You can't love something you don't know. And so I think the four senses are an invitation to know Christ more, which is an invitation to love. I really appreciate you bringing that up. And then Thomas. Yeah, I agree with you that this is how St. Paul reads it. So I really appreciate what you said. This is how Scripture interprets Scripture. So it's not simply the early church. It's an invention of the early church. They're actually reflecting upon how Scripture reads itself. And I would say, and we'll get into some examples, that this isn't simply how St. Paul reads scripture, but it's also how Christ reads Scripture. We actually see that Christ himself interprets Scripture according kind of to the quadriga as well. So maybe that's a good segue into just kind of jumping into each sense. So we'll kind of move through each sense and kind of parse them out. So the literal. We've talked about this, and the literal can be kind of dangerous because we think we know what it is immediately. And even today, when I was reading Aquinas on this, I think he challenged me a bit that it's maybe more encompassing than I think. But when we talk about literal, like, how would we define this? It's the historical, like, historically, what did this mean? It's also the author's intent. What was the author, actually? So if David's writing a psalm, what was he actually intending here? If Moses is, you know, writing Genesis, what is Moses's actually intent in writing these words? You know, it also tends to be genre. I think genre maybe is something that's neglected here a lot. Is this a poem? Is it meant to be literal in that sense? But I think, too, you know, the literal can also encompass things like analogy or things that are parabolic, like the parables. So Christ is, you know, what is Christ literally trying to tell us here? Well, there's a parable, and he meant by the literal words, you know, that the sowing of the seed was like the reception of the gospel in the heart. That was his literal meaning there. He was meaning to connect those. So I think the literal, right, is that base level that looks at the author's intent historically, what was intended to hear and how is it read, what genre is it in? But it's also, I think, broad enough to encompass things like rhetorical devices, analogy, metaphors, parables. That's Kind of, I think how I'm coming to understand the literal.
- [30:20]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Well, Dr. Boyle has a very pithy short thing that to know the literal sense is to know the reality intended by the author and signified by those words. So that's obviously a pretty. It's broader than you might think. And the. And as you mentioned, it encompass paraphrase. It encompasses metaphors as well, where we might talk about the. God's outstretched arm or something like that, which of course, you know, is as a symbol of his power. Well, according to Aquinas and according to the general tradition of the Church, a reference like that to his. To his arm is a. Is literally a reference to his power. So if you tried to interpret that as an arm, that's not being more literal, it's being less literal. Right. Because you're not properly understanding the signification of those words because they didn't signify an arm, they signified his power. And Augustine brings up not that analogy, but similar ones on Christian doctrine, which I'm going to almost throw out a bibliography of things towards the end of it. But one of the things I think would also be very important to read in the sense of trying to read Scripture, the way that the Church read Scripture and read Scripture, is to go through Augustine's on Christian doctrine, which the name would sound broader than it is because he's really talking about different ways and rules of interpreting Scripture.
- [31:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that's good. I mean, introducing people to resources is excellent. Right? Because I don't think anything that we're saying today on the podcast is our own idea. We're trying to echo the tradition that we've received.
- [31:52]
Mr. Adam Minahan
So everything that I have said thus far is my own idea, just for on the record, the whole, know him, love him and serve him in this life so that you can have eternal life with him forever in the next. Like that. I just. Spitballing that just came right off the top of my head.
- [32:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Ultimore Catechism by Adam Minahan. Right underneath there. That's good.
- [32:07]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Mini hand catechism.
- [32:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yes, I remember that. That's good. Yeah, yeah. The Catechism is another good reference on this. It talks about the four senses. So again, this is something that even the modern catechism is trying to push, that. This isn't something that's been. That should be forgotten. It's something that actually should be implemented if you're doing a parish Bible study. The first question of St. Thomas's Summa Theologica, I think in Article 10 takes us up. There's Many good resources. But kind of maybe rooting ourselves in Dante, maybe just to make this explicit. So we'll kind of maybe use one example and then kind of move through it. So he gives the example in his letter that Moses takes Israel out of Egypt. So literally, what does that mean? Well, then we're actually referring to the historical moment of Moses actually leading the captive Israel out of the bondage of Egypt and their slavery. So this is. And then you can take all the things we just talked about. You know, are there metaphors there? What's the historical aspect? What's Moses's intent in writing this? All those things are in the literal itself. But that's like a phrase that I think we can use through all four senses for kind of a clarification. By contrast, the thing too, I. You know, one thing I would throw out here, Thomas. It's interesting. We might be on the same page. Let's kind of figure it out. You mentioned earlier that we might not take the literal literal enough to actually understand it. I think that we might be saying the same thing but different ways. Because I think that one thing I see when we look at Scripture is people tend to be obsessed with the literal. It tends to be like the only way they even interpret Scripture. And I think of all the, like, the German higher criticism, JEDP theories, these kind of things that like, just dissect the literal to the nth degree and have all these theories about it. And what I've realized that is when you kind of get into that mindset of that's how you read Scripture, one, it kills the entire spiritual sense. Because again, the three spiritual senses are predicated upon the literal. So if your literal is so deconstructive to Scripture that you really can't take what it says on face value, everything is held in doubt and skepticism, then you can read these whole commentaries on Scripture that never, ever break into the three spiritual senses. In fact, the early church fathers were amazing at breaking into these, talking about these allegorical reads and these moral reads, and there's these anagogical reads. And the modern commentaries often will disparage those, that those are somehow immature and infantile because we have these like, deep literal reads now. So I think in a lot of ways, as moderns, we're almost obsessed with a literal read. It's not a true literal read. It's actually kind of a disordered, obsessive one. But it seems to be that if we want to approach Scripture, it tends to be the way that our minds tend to gravitate towards Is kind of this kind of deconstructing of the historical side of the text?
- [35:01]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I think we are saying very or very closely to the same thing. Anyway, I don't, I would hesitate to call what they're doing a literal read, though, because I think that the presupposition that comes through in at least a lot. And I'm not to say I want to be clear about this, not all textual criticism would. I would. Am I going to, you know, throw under the bus? Not all historical criticism? But I do think there is a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion that creeps in that this is obviously a synthetic text built across time with no divine authorship and a human authorship intent on constructing systems of power. And that given that, given that as the, as the fundamental. What, what is the text saying? And to be blunt, I just think that is completely the wrong, the fundamentally wrong way to approach Scripture at all. I mean, I'm going to quote Augustine here because it's a great quote and Augustine is just always great. But he says, like, when you come to Scripture, how are you supposed to approach it? And one of his lines, he says is we must rather think and believe that whatever is there written, even though it be hidden, is better and truer than anything we could devise by our own wisdom. Right. So the proper approach to wisdom is that it is revelation. Right. So I would argue that to a great extent, modern theology and modern biblical criticism looks at Scripture as a kind of jumping off point from which rather than God revealing anything to me, I have these sort of like Lego blocks or ingredients from which I'll pick and choose and build up the thing that I want to say or the theory that I want to expound about what Scripture really means or what the author really intended or just what, what I think it ought to be in various ways. And I think that that's just. It's so easy to fall into that approach either from an academic side or even, from, as it were, a denominational side where I have a pet theory which I intend to advance. And, and by the way, I'm not. And when I say this, I'm not, I don't want to criticize any particular denomination. When I, when I put that, I'm saying anyone could fall into that. I have my preconceived thing that I'm going to advance and now I'm going to, you know, smash Scripture into shape to prove my theory. And I, again, I just think this is fundamentally the wrong way to approach it. Now, I don't Want to be a little careful on the last one. I also don't think. I think I will slightly bash one, which is the. Alexander Campbell, one of the restorationists back in the 1800s, had a. Said that. He said, I've endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me. I don't think you could possibly have a worse approach or a less Dante or less Aquinas approach. I think the approach to the Scriptures, you know, following what Augustine said there, there's a notion in which I approach the Scriptures within a rule of faith, right Being as an ecclesial dimension, that the Scriptures and the Church are intimately tied together and inextricable. I read the Scriptures in the Church and the Church interprets the Scriptures. And within that framework and within that approach, then I, when I read it, and for my, for myself, I don't read it in a sense by myself, but within a context and within the, the. In essentially standing on the shoulders of a Dante and, and an Aquinas who is himself standing on the shoulders of an Augustine and an Ambrose and, you know, and you just kind of push this all the way down. And I think that the goal should be to humbly enter into that tradition so that, you know, one thing I heard about Aquinas, I think is immensely true, but also when you think sort of humbling, is that he thought nothing novel about the Scriptures. He was completely typical as to his approach and understanding of the Scriptures. And that's where we would want to be if we understood the Scriptures the way Aquinas did. And we said, yep, we just do it. You know, we're in the same strain. I think. I think we're probably in pretty good shape.
- [39:39]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Deacon, I wonder if the reason why we cling to the literal so much as moderns is because we have relativism that just seeps through all of our thought process that, you know, to the point where we don't understand truth and we don't even know if truth is actually real that it's so hard for us to grasp the actual literal. And so, like, in order for us to even build that, that base, that, that foundation, we're going to go to the nth degree to beat the literal to death because we're not sure if truth is real. If, if, if relativism has just creeped into us so much that, that we're blind to the literal.
- [40:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think both of you bring up really good points, well said on both ends. I think that, to Thomas's point, and I think Also, Adam, to what you're alluding to here, it really is. It's not a true literal sense. Right. It's kind of a bastardization of it. And I really like what I heard from Thomas, which was in a lot of ways the literal approach that we have today, which takes this like hyper critical hermeneutic of suspicion. I appreciated. That phrase really is a usurpation of the divine authorship. I really like that. And maybe that's something we need to lean into a bit, is that the four senses presuppose that God is the author of Scripture.
- [41:09]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah. Aquinas makes this explicit. Right. Because he argues that only divine authorship can comprise the four senses. Now I think there'd be an interesting connection. I'll make a Tolkien connection through to Dante, as must be done, as to what it might mean to be a sub creator. Right. Because Tolkien has this idea on fairy stories that the crafting of these, of these kind of worlds is a, is an act of sub creation in imitation of the Creator. And so I think you could argue that what Dante is doing through his commedia is something like an act of sub creation. And so within his, as a sub creation, he has the freedom as author to recreate the four senses. But in real life, only God can bring the four senses about because the four senses require first a literal sense of the words, like words that signify realities. So in the case of the word, you know, Jerusalem, it signifies an actual city of the Jews. Right. So, but more. But that reality, or actually even I'll use that analogy in a minute. But another simpler analogy would be also the, the lamb in the Passover. Right. What does the lamb. What does the word lamb signify? Well, it signifies an actual lamb. Right. That's what they. They didn't slaughter a figurative lamb in, in Exodus, they slaughtered an actual lamb. And the word signifies that lamb. But what does the lamb signify? And we can. And then the lamb signifies Christ. And so you, and you can keep drawing the analogies out, but the point is to have a reality that signifies another reality requires divine authorship.
- [42:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Let me, let me give like another example that I think is maybe helpful is. Well, I think where divine authorship really stands out is when you have an author who is discussing something and in no way, shape or form is intending their words to signify another thing, but that now after Christ, looking at scripture as a whole, we understand that their words do signify something that the human author never actually intended. But God speaks to them in either an allegorical or even a prophetic way. So let me give, like, a famous example, Psalm 22. So Psalm 22 is a Psalm in which the psalmist is lamenting and talking about all of their troubles and things like this. Well, here's the issue. The psalm starts off, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So when Christ calls out on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Jews that are listening are immediately going to think of this psalm because, again, the Psalms weren't numbered. The Psalms were known by their first line. So then if you go through and you read Psalm 22, it is chilling to read it with the crucifixion in mind, because then what you realize is that in a lot of ways, Psalm 22 reads like what Christ is thinking on the cross. It talks about him being pierced. It talks about his bones not being broken. It talks about them gambling for his clothes. It talks about him being surrounded by his enemies. But then it ends with this note of joy that I will have in triumph. So to me, that's like a really clear example of divine authorship in which the Old Testament author, the psalmist, in no way, shape or form intends his literal words to mean this thing, right? He's not intending to make it a prophecy about the Messiah, but God then turns it into a prophetic voice that we then can see in retrospect through the eyes of the church looking at Scripture. And so I agree with you that one of the things that we see with divine authorship is that when humans use words, we typically use them to convey a reality. And we can also. I agree with you, there is a sub creation because we also can write allegorically. We can try and write in different levels. But in a lot of ways, this is a poor echo of the divine authorship that we see. I want to read this quote you read from Augustine, pulling from a different source, the opening of St. Thomas Aquinas's article on this in his first question, this is article 10, he actually pulls from St. Gregory in his commentary. He says, holy writ, by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. I think that's just like, really beautiful. And I think that maybe to maybe try and encapsulate or summarize what we're trying to express here is that the four senses is a deeply spiritual reading of Scripture that presupposes divine authorship. And I think it's that presupposition that is missing from most of modern commentaries. They do not start with the presupposition that God is the author of Scripture. And maybe to use your phrase or maybe to use your imagery, they then do. They usurp the role of divine authority and try and step in as, like a critical commentator to play that role. And then it deconstructs the literal, and then we can't move on because the foundation of our house has crumpled.
- [46:26]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
I would go even a step further that it. It presupposes not only divine authorship of Scripture, but divine authorship of nature, so that created natures in themselves end up signifying other things. Right. So sticking with Augustine for a second, where he talks about the eternal Jerusalem, he talks about Sarah and Hagar, and he talks about various things, and he just has a little comment at the end that, quote, all these things stood for something other than what they were, but all the same, they were themselves bodily realities. And Abbott Nesteros, who's quoted by John Cassian in the Conferences, which I'll throw that out as another really good one to read, is the. From number 14, presumably sections 8 through 10. But he uses Jerusalem as the example, and he does it for all four senses. And he says, he said. And so these four previously mentioned figures coalesce in one subject so that one and the same Jerusalem can be taken in four senses, historically as the city of the Jews, allegorically as the church of Christ, and egogically as the heavenly city of God, and tropologically as the soul of man, which is frequently subject to praise or blame for the Lord under this title. So he compresses it all to one word and uses all four senses, I gotta say, tropologically, the moral sense.
- [47:55]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Okay, yeah. You knew what I was gonna ask.
- [47:58]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, yeah, I saw that on your face. Yeah. So you sometimes hear them say, tropologically it's the same as the moral sense, though. But I mean, it's this kind of idea that what they're saying in the four senses requires not just that that Scripture itself have divine authorship, but that the entire unfolding of history and providence is divinely authored, and that the two are then reinforcing each other and pointing either to historical reality at literal sense, allegorically pointing forward to Christ morally. And this would be immoral. Not like the Beatitudes, where that's just at the literal sense, you know, but where the example of the life of someone becomes a moral example to us on how we ought to live. Or anagogically, as it points us, we haven't even quite broached this Term. But it's like the ladder up. It's what lifts us up into the heaven reality of Beatitude. Right. So this is the. Our future home has a smirk.
- [48:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I'm going to defer to him. Adam, do you have a. Do you have a commentary?
- [48:57]
Mr. Adam Minahan
No, no, no. I'm just. You guys had to have missed, like, the. Can we pause for just a second, try to figure out what the heck Lackey was actually just trying to say. I'm glad that you, like, took a second to actually, you. You saw my face, Thomas, and you were like, yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot. Adam is now back on that pod on the podcast. Let me. Let me. Let me. Let me slow down for just a second. So I appreciate that because that actually did help.
- [49:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, nothing. If you were curious, Thomas hasn't changed. So he's. He also looked at 400 commentaries before coming on tonight. So, I mean, it's okay if you only looked at 100, Adam. That's okay. We'll still have you on as a guest. Thomas sets a high bar if you have them on. So but let's push forward because I think Thomas did a good mapping there, kind of overall, with several good examples. So that's the literal. Now let's look at the allegorical. So coming into the spiritual side, coming to. How do we spiritually read these things? Let's look at the allegorical. And so the allegorical is really interesting. You know, basically one thing is an analog for another. It's a series of analogies, sometimes also called typology. We're looking at how one thing serves as the type of another. And so maybe just to kind of parse this out, let's take Dante's own example. So again, we're looking at Moses leading Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. So we know what the literal is there. We know this historical event. But then what is the allegorical? So one way you read this and actually just coming off of Easter, the church looks at this very much in her Easter readings during particularly her Lenten readings, is you can read this allegorically as our salvation in Christ. So how does this play out? Well, Moses then equals Christ. Egypt is our slavery to sin, right? Israel is us. It's the people of God. And we are in Egypt in bondage. We're in slavery to sin. The crossing of the Red Sea, the thing that we have to cross, the water that we have to cross to get from out of our bondage and slavery to the Promised Land, well, that's baptism. Those are the waters of baptism that lead us out of slavery and into the promised land. What about manna? What about the manna that they ate in the desert? Well, that's the Holy Eucharist. The time in the desert is like our earthly pilgrimage. Here we're marching towards the promised Land. We're having to labor in this kind of foreign and alien soil. And we're fed. We're fed by manna, which is an analogy type A foreshadowing of the Holy Eucharist. And of course, then we come to the promised Land, which is our salvation. So when we look at an allegorical reading, we're mainly looking at how does one type of thing serve as a type of another? How is one thing an analog to another type of thing?
- [51:52]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, and I think that it almost helps to rewind it a little bit. To what? So Augustine and Aquinas are both presupposing the idea that words are signs of things, like words are signs of realities. And then they quickly move into saying, well, words are signs of things, and things can be signs of things. And so there's a kind of a whole theory of symbolism going on that once you sort of. Once you have the decoder ring for what they're trying to do, you get. It's not really that hard a move to say, well, just like the word lamb signifies a lamb, well, the Lamb signifies Christ, but at the level of reality, as in the actual Passover lamb pointed towards Christ.
- [52:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think maybe really clear principle here that both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas lean into is that the Old Testament foreshadows the New and the New Testament perfects the Old. So I tell people in OCIA all the time when we're going through our classes on how to become Catholic that if you remember one thing about how to read Scripture, just remember this little mantra that the Old Testament foreshadows the New and the New Testament perfects the Old. And so we see that. Right. What would be an example of that? Well, this would be the reality that we just talked about, of seeing how Israel being led out of Egypt can be allegorical, can be an analog to Christ leading us out of sin. And maybe to tie in a few things we've already talked about, where we see this very clearly in Scripture is our Lord does this in the eucharistic discourse. In John 6, he says, Right, I am the bread of life. And he talks about manna. He says, your forefathers, right, were fed in the desert by this bread from heaven, but now I am the bread of heaven. So he makes this picture. This is how our Lord is interpreting Scripture. He's saying, okay, listen, here is this type of thing that you had in the Old Testament. You had bread that came down from heaven. That is foreshadowing then me, I am the bread of life that's come down from heaven. And I then perfect this image. I perfect this type. And then, of course, in John 6, right. He says that you have to eat his flesh and drink his blood, or you have no life in you. And so he becomes. Then, you know, in the Holy Eucharist, he becomes our salvation. He becomes how we receive him and become part of the body of Christ. So I think it's going back to an earlier point, Thomas, that you made and that I very much agreed with, is that this is actually how our Lord is also interpreting Scripture as well.
- [54:43]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah. And for example, the analogy you used a little bit ago, or the not even analogy, the reference to about the, the crossing of the Red Sea as baptism is something Paul explicitly states. Right. So this is Paul as well, interpreting in this way. And it, it's certainly not. It's certainly not immediately obvious, without rising above literal sense, that the cloud and the Red Sea were signs of sacraments to come. Right. So it. But. But, you know, they're. They're not, but they presuppose a literal Red Sea and a literal cloud. And I think, you know, this is, I think, pushing back a little to what we're saying about reality. I think sometimes we want to overly figure. We want to create an overly figurative language, the notion that maybe these things didn't actually happen, but they. I think that that's a very dangerous game to play because the realities have to. Have to be real in order to figure. So they just throw that out some more. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to take a flatly sort of fundamentalist read of everything, but I do think it's important to have in that same idea of divine authorship and that the, the. The speech, this. The scriptures speak truths. Yeah. Yo, go ahead.
- [56:15]
Mr. Adam Minahan
I was just going to ask. So for somebody who may be hearing this for the first time, Deacon, and like, trying to absorb it and understand it and then say, like, okay, I'm going to go apply this. As I'm starting to read Scripture, I want, I want to be looking, you know, for this typology, Is there ever. Is there a danger of taking the allegorical too far? Is there a danger of not being tempered in this allegorical. In allegorical reads to where you're actually trying to connect dots that actually are not meant to be connected. And what does that look like?
- [56:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a wonderful question to dovetail that maybe to a text. It's interesting that in St. Thomas Aquinas's commentary on this, one of the objections, which is false, but it's an objection that he sets forward, is that there really can't be this many readings of Scripture because the four senses will cause confusion. And there's two kind of responses to that that I think are important. One is we have to remember that the literal anchors things, right? It's a foundation of the house. So you can't. You. You can't just simply come in and start giving all these crazy allegorical reads because it has to be rooted into the literal text itself. So that would be maybe one boundary, right? If we're looking at what are the boundaries of an allegorical read, I think that the literal provides one. I think too, though, the teachings of Jesus Christ, right. The reality of who Christ is and then particularly as that is taught to us by the Church, is another boundary. So Scripture can't become, and I think this is kind of what Thomas was talking about too, in a certain way. You can't simply take Scripture as like a collection of signs, like interesting stories that then I can turn into any kind of allegory that I can fit together. If I can create these different sinews between the signs, all of a sudden the parable of the Good Samaritan can become this crazy modern thing simply because I can make the allegory work. Well, that would be a violation then of, I think, both the literal of what was actually intended by Christ when he gave us that, but also the reality of who Jesus Christ is and his teachings and his church. So I think these are like two boundaries that we use, because I will say sometimes the allegorical read gets very detailed and also might be a little bit of a push. Like St. Augustine is famous for this sometimes of giving these allegorical reads. He's like, well, this is what the donkeys like, and this is what the moon was like. And this was this. And the thing is, like, there are catechetical and pedagogical benefits that those types of reads. And the problem is, is that all analogies fall short at some point. That's why they're analogies. They're not the thing itself. And so you're always going to have something that kind of falls short when it tries the image, something else. But I do think, I think it's a wonderful question And I do think then when we want to read like this, which I think comes with habit, it also comes from mimicry. So, like, I would say this isn't something that we need to like, I'm gonna go read Scripture and come up with my own allegory. I think what you do is you actually read commentaries on Scripture that are. That are pulling from the Church Fathers and just get into a habit of reading. Okay, how did Augustine read this text? How did St. Thomas read this text? And that kind of sharpens your capacity to have these kind of conversations, and then your boundaries are the literal and then kind of the nature of Christ and his church.
- [59:28]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, you said much better. What I was trying to get at, that there's that. Where are the sort of, like the anchor points along in here? And I think there's the danger of cutting off the literal or overly figure, sort of cutting your allegory free from the literal until it floats away is something that I don't think would have made any sense to Aquinas, because, again, the spiritual senses presuppose the literal, and it's at the level of the literal that theological disputation takes place. Right. There's actually theology is anchored to the literal read, not the allegorical or the moral or the anagogical read, which is, again, maybe a little bit surprising. We just assume that surely theology is based on the spiritual sense of the text, and Aquinas is quite explicit, as is Augustine, that no theology actually takes place at the level of the literal.
- [60:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a good point. I was actually surprised to read that again today in Thomas's question in his Summa, in which he states that there is nothing in the allegorical read that cannot be found first in the literal, so everything has to be found.
- [60:42]
Mr. Adam Minahan
That's what I was hoping you.
- [60:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And I think that's another boundary then, too, and I guess maybe a rearticulation of the first one I talked about, of the literal being the foundation. But you can't. If you come up these allegorical reads that seem to be in violation of the literal or seem to be completely detached, kind of just floating out there, then I think you've kind of pushed too far. But speaking of pushing, let's push into the moral one, and I want to maybe make an argument here that the Church presents these to us through Dante, through St. Thomas Aquinas, in a pedagogical order. Right. She's presented these to us in the order that we're supposed to move through them. And so you have your literal, which you have to come to understand first. Then you have your allegorical, how's the literal, maybe an analog to something else. Then you have your moral. And I think this is really important because I think we skipped this step. So if you go to any normal parish Bible study, what I have typically seen is this. They read the literal. Okay, great. And usually there's some questions about, like, when was this written and who wrote this? Like, there's like, someone usually asks a few questions on the, like, historicity of things, and then you immediately skip into, how's this apply to your life? What ought you do? And you skip the allegorical. And I think the problem with skipping the allegorical is you skip such a rich banquet from which to pull from. So if you have the literal, and the literal is serving as signs or these analogs to different types of things and different lessons that you could pull out of the text, that just actually gives you much more depth in richness to pull from. When then you look at Scripture to say, how do I apply this to my life? And so I think there's a certain way that we make Scripture very thin and flat. And what that does is it limits our capacity to pull moral lessons from the text itself.
- [62:30]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah. And I think there's another sense in which we. Well, there's two points I think, to make to that. One, the moral read is not really about moral exhortation. Right. So when the Bible says something to the effect of an admonition to be generous to the poor, that's not a moral read. Right. That is the literal sense is it is exhorting you to be generous to the poor. However, and I'll use a negative moral, if we see Esau sell his birthright for lentils, and we. We read it, we see in that the exchange of the life in the state of grace for the. For sin and essentially throwing away the more the grace for earthly things, that's a moral read. Right. Because you're looking at the action of someone and either taking it as how we ought to act or how we ought not to act, as Scripture lays out. So it's really the life of Christ and the saints, or in some cases, negative examples, frequently from the Old Testament, that are where the moral read operates.
- [63:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think that's a sharp distinction. Maybe to give another example, for instance, like, I wouldn't say that when you read a parable, and our Lord is clearly literally intending that parable to be an analog for the kingdom of God, that's not, properly speaking, the allegorical sense, because it's actually part of the literal sense. It's actually what our Lord was meaning to communicate. The allegorical is like. Then you say, okay, well, actually the Good Samaritan is actually like the church. Or it's like the Christian who picks up the person and the donkey's like this, and the innkeeper is like this, and the inn is the church. Like that then becomes the allegorical read. And I agree with you, Thomas, that then it's from that richness, that text that we can then extract, okay, what then is a moral lesson? Or as Aquinas says, like, what ought I do? How does this actually apply to my life here and now? How do I configure myself to Jesus Christ in how I live according to what I've pulled out from these two senses? And maybe to keep like with our. Our example, right? Dante, on leaving, on Israel, leaving Egypt, he says, the conversion of this. This is like, what's a moral read of this? He says, the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace. So if we first read the literal of Israel living, leaving Egypt, then we have it as an allegorical read of like, no, this is like Moses is like Christ leading us from our bondage of sin into the promised land. Then the moral read is, okay, but how does my soul, how do I apply this to my life? How does my soul then move from the slavery of sin to being in a state of grace? And then we apply that to our lives and we have to ask ourselves, then how do I do this? How do I grow in virtue? How do I make my soul beautiful like Christ is beautiful? And I think that as moderns, this is probably too negative. As moderns, I think we're used to the moral reed because we're used to being atomized and individualistic and thinking about ourselves. So asking how does this apply to my life? Seems to be a normal question, like view to a Bible study, that seems to be a normal question. But again, they're not pulling from the richness that the Church offers us to answer that question. And so we kind of handicap ourselves at times. Any other thoughts on the. On the moral side? What ought I do? I just think it's very impoverished if it's done without the allegorical.
- [66:03]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Well, it's. I'll say one thing, it's too long to read. But Aquinas, at the end of the. His article here, so It's a question. One article 10 of the Prima pars, has us an example in which he also takes one passage and goes through all four senses and offers a moral read on. I believe, if I recall correctly, it's on the disciples rubbing the, the, the, the kernels of corn in their hands on the Sabbath. And anyway, I just recommend people go read that if they can. Again, it's too long to read right now, but it gives you kind of the, the sense in which an example like that, like what is the moral of that is. Is not at all clear, but he draw the moral read arises out of the. The other sense or through the other senses.
- [66:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, particularly the allegorical. Yeah, it's just, it's an invitation to have a much richer moral read to it. And so I think it's something that it's not familiar to us as moderns. It seems to be kind of absent from most, kind of just like normie Bible studies. And so I think it's maybe one way that we can try and add a richness into our parishes and into our communities is to try and reinsert that kind of allegorical read or find ourselves a commentary that actually draws from the early church fathers and get used to then how they read that. Because if you read an early church father father commentary, like say, Aquinas's Golden Chain, which is on the Gospels, and he's organizing all the early church comments on the Gospels. Yeah, there it is right there. Very good. Vanna White. We appreciate it. For those joining by video, then you really get, like, it's all allegorical and you really get used to what they're trying to pull from it. But they're mining the depths of Scripture to ultimately terminate in some type of, you know, moral read. But then there's also this fourth one, and I think this is the one that people struggle with the most. I'll be clear that sometimes even myself, I don't know exactly how to make this distinction at times, but the fourth one is the anagogical. And so this is again, a word we don't use very often, our catechism, which, by the way, this is like paragraph 116,117, if you want to look it up. It comes from the Greek term meaning leading. Right. To lead. Leading. And this is where we are viewing these realities. So we're kind of, remember, these senses build upon each other. So we're viewing the literal, the allegorical and the moral. We're now viewing all of these together as what is their eternal significance? How does this communicate to me about my final end in God? Dante talks about that. The question here is, how does this lead me to the eternal glory in heaven. What does this teach me about my final end in God?
- [68:46]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
This is why I liked Nesteros is very like simple analogy using just Jerusalem, because there you get perhaps most compressed in these three meanings. You have the historical or the literal read, which is the city of Jerusalem. You have the allegorical read, which is the church of Christ, because the allegorical always points towards Christ, whether as head or body. So in this case, body and the. And then the anagogical read, which is related to our destiny, which is the new Jerusalem, but which is mentioned obviously frequently in Hebrews, in Revelation, etc. So you've got sort of Jerusalem at three levels of these spiritual of the senses of Scripture. Now, I admit the moral read of Jerusalem was a little trickier, but at this one, it's like they pretty much just stack. City, church, heaven.
- [69:44]
Mr. Adam Minahan
I was gonna say, like, is it safe to say that it's. It's very hard to get to the anagogical if you don't understand the moral?
- [69:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, I think they build upon one another, right? So I know.
- [69:54]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Yeah. So like, if you don't understand, like, okay, what is the moral of it? Like, like, what am I. Like, what am I trying to. Like, what does this mean for my practical life? And like. So it seems like the anagogical is kind of like, like, what the. What is it the fifth way of acquiring, like the teleology. Like, what are we made for? Like, what is the end of man? Like, what are we. What are we called to? So, like, it doesn't actually matter. You can't actually get to that point if you don't understand what, what. Like, we're made for virtue. We're made for contemplation. Right as man. You can't get to that if you don't understand what virtue. Like, why we should strive for virtue, but why we should be pursuing the. A life of holiness. It seems like that it's. It would be hard to divorce those two. And if you miss the moral, it would be very hard to get to the anagogical.
- [70:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, one way, one way to do this might be to look at it, the four senses, insofar as they're broken into time. So this is kind of a raw thought that just occurred to me. But the literal is. Is very much a historical read because you're dealing with a historically written text. Then you have the allegorical. And the allegorical in a lot of ways is also historical because you're looking primarily at how do the Old Testament and New Testament interrelate so, you know, how does the Old Testament foreshadow the New? And how does the New Testament perfect the Old? Then when you get to the moral, it seems very much rooted in the present. How does this apply to my life? How do I become a better Christian? You know, how do I beautify my soul, theosis, sanctification, etc. So then anagogical then seems to be very much scratched squarely in the realm of the future, which makes it, I think, characterized by the virtue of hope. What is my anchor in God? What is it that I'm hoping for as my final end? And how does this kind of point me towards that eternal glory? And that might be one way to look at it, as we're kind of distinguishing it from the other senses, is this is something that calls us to look forward to our eternal glory with God.
- [71:49]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
One of an anonymous student of St. Thomas wrote a pithy little poem to Remember the Senses. And it reads the. The letter speaks of deeds, allegory to faith, the moral, how to act, anagogy, our destiny. Now apparently in Latin, that has more like poetic form, but it, I mean, it gets us down into, like in, in a really short way, basically what you're saying. We've got a historical aspect, you've got allegory as to the faith itself, you've got how to act and then our destiny.
- [72:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I think that's a pithy summary. Is that in the catechism? I think I remember that.
- [72:29]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
I don't know, I'm pulling it off of a different book, but I might well be.
- [72:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think it might actually be in the modern catechism too, as a very succinct little summary. So, no, I think that's very good. Yeah. So this is the quadriga, right? This is our four horsed chariot. The literal, the allegorical, the moral and anagogical. And again, as we've kind of already mentioned several times, I think it's a habit. This is a skill set. It's a muscle. You have to kind of grow, you have to kind of understand, you have to be comfortable with it. But again, like most things, we grow by mimicking other people. We have to see it. And so, yeah, I'd pick up the Golden Chain. That's a fantastic commentary. Also, people forget that St. Thomas, he wrote the Summa for beginners, but typically what he was actually a teacher of was scripture. And so he has several commentaries as well. And even the, the new Ignatius Bible, which is a phenomenal Bible, the study Bible, it's Old Testament, New Testament. I think it's a really good balance between the four. So it's going to have a lot of the literal, because that's what we crave. Right. I want to see the maps. I want to see where everything is. I want to know, like, when do they think this is written and who, what author it has? All of that. That's great. But it also, I think, too, at very key times, will then go into the allegorical, the moral, and anagogical. So that's. That's a very easily accessible Bible, if you can find it right now. Sometimes it's hard to find, but it's a wonderful text. And so I think that if you get a good commentary and you start reading scripture and think about the four senses, you'll kind of grow in your familiarity and your capacity to read scripture like this, and then your spiritual life and your relationship with Christ will blossom.
- [74:01]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah. I want to sort of second the Catena aria recommendation as a really good place to start. It's fairly approachable in the short, since it's a commentary just on the Gospels. It's one volume per gospel. Aquinas doesn't write the commentary in this case. He selects reads from the Fathers and weaves them together into a floralium, as they used to call them, this selection of quotations. But they flow together, and it happens to be that the English translation is translated by John Henry Newman. So you've got Doctor of the Church pulling from the Fathers of a church, translated by St. John Henry Newman. It's really. It's. It's going to be a commentary that's kind of tough to beat.
- [74:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, it's. It's a beautiful text. Also, it occurs to me, the ancient Christian comment, yes, Thomas has everything in his little library there.
- [74:59]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Library, yeah. There you go.
- [75:01]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah. So there's. This is 22 volumes, I think. I do not have them all stacked right here, but it's totally worth it. You can get it on Verbum or Logos or something as well. So it's important to think about. If you don't have their, you know, a big stack. It's great. It's my. It's by far my. It's sort of structured like a catena, but across all of Scripture, and it was a fairly modern project.
- [75:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's good. I just want to tell everyone that, you know, on the podcast, we do plan on reading Scripture, so you only have to wait as long as me to get through Plato and then Aristotle and then a lot of the Romans, and then we will Go to Scripture. So it's only gonna be a couple more years, but, you know, just wait with bated breath.
- [75:50]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Reading from the gospel of Hoarding. Dude, look. Yeah, three years old.
- [75:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I tell my daughter that I'm gonna hand this podcast over to her. By the time that I get old, we might make it to Boethius, and then I'm going to have to hand it over to her and she's going to have to continue. But it's. We're a slow burn here at Ascend, but a slow, steady pace has a lot of fruit. So any kind of final comments, Thomas or Adam kind of on this quadriga, the Four Senses.
- [76:19]
Mr. Adam Minahan
So I would say just one thing is that if this is new to you, if this is like a new concept to you that you're trying to soak in one way that I found to be very fruitful to, to really grow these muscles is actually reading like Aesop's Fables and things like that to my children. Because sometimes the scriptures can be intimidating and if you don't have the container, the container, Aria, or you, you don't have these resources that all these infinite resources that Thomas Lackey does behind him. Uh, and it can be a little intimidating. Uh, but I, I think this is the, the beauty of, of. Of maybe, you know, some of these great books and, and some of the things that we can pass on to our children is that it actually, like reading Aesop's Fables, helping our imaginations, imagination grow really can. Can build that muscle to where, when you approach these more mature texts, when you approach the things that, that truly that you have this foundation that you've already put together, that you've already formed. So that way it doesn't. It comes a little bit more naturally. And it's. It's amazing whenever you do this with your children, when you're reading these things to your children, how quickly they're able to actually pick. Pick up on this. And it actually becomes. It's way more natural to them. So even if you're not good at it, if this is new to you, if this is something that you feel like, I don't know how to teach this to my children, it's okay. Coming from experience, like, I'm like, a very good example of this is that this is all new to me. But I was able to like, as I read to the, to my children, as I expose them to these great texts and ask them questions and have them think about like, not just the literal or not just the moral, like, what is CS like, what is, you know, CS Lewis trying to say here, right, In Narnia? Like what? Like, these things really help our children to be deforming their intellect and their imagination. So I just. Like, this is a good conversation to have, but it can be intimidating if this is the very first time you're hearing it. And I just want to encourage you to not be intimidated and to maybe take even these baby steps of Aesop's Fables. CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, like all these. These. These great writers that you can read to your children and kind of form these habits and. And the intellect and imagination.
- [78:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I simply just want to echo how amazing the Chronicles of Narnia are to introducing a child's mind to the concept of allegory. And that one thing can serve as a type of another. Yeah, that's a fantastic recommendation. When I read that to my daughter, I just kind of let it slowly sink in, and all of a sudden there's that moment where she's like, wait. Aslan's like Jesus. It's like, yes, he is. The dying, resurrecting lion is like Jesus. Right. But for their young minds, like, that is a wonderful stretch. Right. That's a wonderful kind of maturation. I think, too, to echo something you said with Aesop, is I've recently been reading a letter by St. Basil, and it's actually, should Young Christian Men Read the Pagans? And one of his arguments, he gives a brilliant little analog in there in which he says that reading scripture is like the fruit of the branch, but reading pagan literature is like the leaves. It actually prepares the branch for the fruit. And one thing we. We're at the end here. But one thing, maybe a large claim to make, is that a lot of how to read scripture here, I think, actually came through the Hellenized branch of the church. It came actually through Judaism being Hellenized, you know, prior to the coming of our Lord. And again, Christ came in the fullness of time. Because one of the things that we're going to see when we read Plato, so after this reading the Greek plays, and then we're going into Plato, one thing you'll see with the Greek plays to a certain degree, but particularly in Plato, is that his writing has multiple layers. They're used to this, right. That there's a literal, but then also there's kind of a typological, there's an allegorical. Like, they're used to reading things that have analogies in them, and then there is a moral read. How does this then apply to My life. And so I think the Greeks, the pagans particularly, right. Really do help train the mind for a proper reading of scripture. So that's really stuck with me recently about St. Basil, that reading pagan literature is like the leaves, and then it prepares the branch for the fruit of holy scripture. And again, you can. So you don't have to necessarily read your small children like, hey, here's Plato's Republic. This is preparing you for the Bible. Or read them Dante's Inferno. You should.
- [81:03]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
You should.
- [81:03]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Let's be honest, you should.
- [81:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But read to your kids, you know, Dante's Inferno and be like, listen, Deacon said we have to read this because it prepares you for Scripture. We do have an unnamed friend who tried to play Dante's Inferno as an audiobook on the way to school for his whole family. It's like, little kids are like, why? Why are they being stung by wasps? What's happening? Why are they marching for eternity? And so they didn't even make it out of the vegetable of hell before that got turned off because we're like, yeah, it gets a lot, lot worse. So anyway. But yes, no, I think that's a wonderful recommendation. Thomas, any kind of final words?
- [81:38]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
Yeah, yeah. I think one thing to piggyback on what Adam was saying that and also borrow from St. Augustine. But one of the important things in reading scripture and in trying to go into the deeper senses of scripture is first to have the arc and story of scripture. So it really need to have the whole picture before you try to do the deep dive in little parts. So I think the first thing anyone could do and would be fantastic would. Would be to obviously grab yourself a Bible and listen to Father Mike Schmidt's Bible in a Year podcast. Because that would be about the best way possible to just. If you don't have a background already in the entire arc and story of scripture before going into the deeper senses, get that story. And I mean, there's almost no excuse in a sense, because Fowler does a great job. And he also in the commentary after that, it is not purely literal or moral reading. He also will draw on these senses. So you're getting a little bit of both things going on. So if you haven't done that, go listen to that. It's a good thing. I think that the second part would be that I think there's a kind of moral preparation. Oh, wait. Actually, let me back up before I say that in the bibliography. You know, I kind of idea. I mentioned on Christian doctrine by Augustine. I would also recommend his two works on generous Genesis. And I think one of the things that approaches, that you're going to see there is that when you approach Scripture, you're going to have a lot of questions, right? And as we all do, you're never going to have more than Augustine dead because he asks himself and he asks God question after question after question of what did you mean by this? Did you mean this or did you mean that? Did you mean both? And he, he doesn't. When we're talking about literal, I think there is this idea of being. Of taking an almost too simplistic reading when you see how Augustine approached Genesis and trying to understand what parts of Genesis are literal in the sense that the language is meant to convey a historical sequence of events and what part is figurative and wrestling with which parts of which you'll see that these kind of questions, even to the saints and the doctors, are almost eternal questions. Because he visits this in books 12 and 13, the Confessions. He writes another book on Genesis and then another book on Genesis and keeps coming back and wrestling with the same questions over and over again. And I think that's really important that it's a lifetime struggle in many of these times to, to. To approach even the literal senses of the text and yet let. Let alone to build up to the, to the. I guess, related to that also. I'm going to toss out one thing by Aquinas there at the end, which he was also very concerned of, that people assert nothing that's false as being part of Scripture because there would be an idea that you might associate a personal belief with what is Scripture. And then when that personal belief falls away, then the faith falls away with it. But in fact, you just misidentified what I thought was true with what the Scripture teaches. So that's, I think, one of these other parts about being very humble as to what the church, how the church reads Scripture, and not presupposing too firm an understanding of what you thought the faith required. In that I'm specifically also thinking a lot about the creation narratives and others which are, I think, to just draw on Augustine slightly there. He will look at Genesis 1 as largely figurative and generous, Genesis 2 as largely historical.
- [85:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Which goes back into the kind of question of literal and what is the genre, which I think is an incredibly important part now. Very well said. I appreciate all the comments that both of you have given tonight. I appreciate you guys kind of walking us through this. I think this is a fantastic lesson that we can come to time and time again. I remember when I kind of was first introduced to this and I think trying to kind of stretch my own imagination to try and read Scripture, I think in the way that the church invites us to read it through the lessons of the early church, through Dante and through St. Thomas Aquinas as well. Adam, where. Where can people find more about you and your work now that you're all gallivanting around and doing great things?
- [86:33]
Mr. Adam Minahan
Oh, I don't know if anybody wants to come look at anything that I've been doing. I. You can follow me on x, I guess. Minahan8, you can do that. That's probably. I'm not. I don't really do a whole lot of social media other than. Other than X. So you can find me there.
- [86:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, good. I keep trying to talk Thomas into joining X, but he also doesn't want to ruin his life. So I'm not really sure how to get over that barrier. But I'm like, listen, there's like, you know, there are good conversations and there's spaces. We can do all this stuff and stuff. And so one day I'll kind of convince him to join or at least not be a lurker and kind of, you know, join, ascend and do spaces. We could do all kinds of cool stuff. Thomas, if you ever want to jump off into the abyss with me, it'd be great.
- [87:16]
Mr. Thomas Lackey
I don't know. I've got. I've got. I've got it blocked on our network at home. I feel safer that way.
- [87:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, yes, you're more prudent man than I am. All right, you too. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being on this evening and kind of leading us through, I think was a very excellent conversation on the four senses. Everyone, we are leaving Dante. So we read Dante for Lent, and last week we had lying as contraceptive speech and a few lessons on Dante, liberalism and Jesus Christ. And now this week, we've had our lessons from Dante on how to read Scripture. And so now we are leaving Dante and we'll be going to the Greek plays. So this is what we were actually discussing before we had Lent. So Ascend typically moves chronologically through the great books, which is a good way to read the great books because then you join the quote, unquote, great conversation between these authors. You kind of see how they're dialoguing with one another. And so we have read the Iliad together, the Odyssey together, Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Oresteia, then took a break for Lent to read Dante's Inferno and Now we are going back to the Greek plays. So next week we have Dr. Jared Zimmerer of Benedictine College to come on, and he is actually going to lead us through Prometheus Bound. Prometheus Bound. So if you want to join us, if you haven't read the Greek plays or you don't know who Escalus is, go look. A few episodes ago we introduced them. There's an episode on how to read the Greek plays with us. There's also a whole episode actually with Mr. Manahan on introducing Aeschylus. And we'll be reading Prometheus Bound next week, the green translation. So kind of again, if you have started a small group for Lent and you've really enjoyed reading a great text together, then just simply don't stop. Go back and read the Iliad, go back and read the Odyssey, or join us as we read the Greek plays together. We're going to be reading those until pretty much maybe early summer. And then, excuse me, not early summer, late summer. And then we'll be moving into Plato and starting with the Platonic dialogues, which we've already filmed maybe 16, 17 episodes on. And I'm really excited to show you those to you guys because I've learned a lot. So again, we appreciate everyone being here. And join us next week as we read Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. We will see you next week. Thank you.